


Marigolds and Candles

by Headspacedeficit



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, dia de los muertos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 01:46:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8425903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Headspacedeficit/pseuds/Headspacedeficit
Summary: On Dia de los Muertos, the dead are honored. Jesse has never been able to leave them neglected.He doesn't have an altar. He doesn't have a home. He still talks to his ghosts and wonders if this is what it's supposed to feel like when they don't talk back.





	1. Chapter 1

            There’s no procession for the dead in Switzerland on this day.  There’s no party, no vendors, no decorations, no music in the streets.  Jesse thinks that maybe it’s better this way even if it doesn’t feel right.

            Jesse has no graves of his own to honor.  He thinks it was the same for Gabe, with a grave so bare.  Gabriel Reyes had been a complicated man: commanding but encouraging, strict but indulgent, cruel to be kind or kind to be cruel.  Jesse McCree’d be hard pressed to tell a body what Gabriel Reyes had been to him.  But he’s here, on a holy day, with a couple of things that’d fit on an altar and no idea what he’d doing with himself.

            He has no home to build an altar.  Interpol is on his tail and he’s got no allies or friends he can expose like this; everyone he knows has gone underground or is tiptoeing around civilian life.  He’s a day or two ahead of them, at least, because even he didn’t know he’d be here on this day.

            He’s got one candle.  It’s a long, tapered one he begged off a Father in Germany.  It’s not the kind of thing that belongs outside, alone in the cold and grass, but it smells right.  He’s got a little bundle of careful marigolds, paper, that he twisted together in the cramped space of a shipping container on the way over.  He’d jabbed wire into his fingers to the half hazy memory of someone showing him how to make bright things.  He has a beat up bowl of water and a single Tecaté because the dead are always thirsty.  It’s not like it’s good beer but it’s not like Gabe ever cared.  Jesse doesn’t know where to find pan de muerto.  The little brioche buns he’s got instead cost him dearly for something he’s not going to be able to eat.

            It’s a sad setup he got going on Gabe’s grave.  One candle set deep into the soft dirt.  A ring of clumsy paper flowers around its base.  A bowl of water.  An opened beer.  Bread set between them.

            Jesse talks.  He says stupid things like how he’s so damn mad and how Gabe was such a damn fool and how he is so, so tired.  Jesse talks about the Diné and the Oklahoma Cherokee.  He updates Gabe about what he’s been up to, all his successes and his blunders.  It’s the first time Jesse’s been on his own in a long time.

            He goes back to talking about the Pima and the Yaqui on both sides of the border.  He scoffs at the security and echoes a younger man.

Stops himself.

            Talks about some tired Apache women and the Coeur D'alene Indians he hid with.  Talks about the people of the Red Earth who have endured and the country that has forgotten them.  Talks about his first hover-horse ride which was...weird.

            “Damn thing’s not a horse or a bike.  Must’ve landed in the dirt twenty times ‘fore it stuck.”  Jesse shakes his head, thumbs hooked through his belt loops and grin dimpling his mouth.  “Would have laughed your head off, Boss-”

            He shuts his trap real quick-like.  Looks at his offerings and the dripping church taper.  Focuses on the cold stone and soft earth far from any warmth.  He puts his face in his hand and doesn’t know if this is sobbing or laughter.


	2. Chapter 2

            It’s not that Ana’s grave hurts less.  It’s just that there’s no betrayal attached to hers.  Ana loved him, taught him and protected him.  Ana may as well have been his Ma.  Gabe protected him, taught him and maybe even loved him but that doesn’t make him his Dad.  But with Ana, he never doubted it.

            Jesse McCree at 17 thought that Ana Amari could do anything.  Jesse McCree at 26 had thought the same thing up until she hadn’t come home to them.  This isn’t the first time he’s been to her grave.  It’s not even the first time he’s left her something.  But he hasn’t talked to her.  The dead come back one day of the year to speak with us and even though Jesse knows it’s just a tradition, that the dead are gone and nothing brings them back, it’s an idea he can’t shake.

It’s lonely talking to an empty grave.

            So he doesn’t talk much.  Jesse tells her about how Fareeha’s been doing, far as he knows.  Kid hasn’t talked to him much since Ana died.  His baby sister probably hates him for not coming back for her during the collapse.  He mails letters or leaves notes or places symbols where he hopes she’ll see them on the news.  Jesse’s okay at encryption but he doesn’t want to bring trouble to her door, so he doesn’t risk it, so he doesn’t talk, so he can’t know much.  Jesse’s trouble, always has been, and no Egyptian college kid needs that.

            He works his hands as he chatters.  Ana always told him that if he was going to busy his mouth, he may as well busy his hands.  He always did bring his best back to her.  

            The stuff he’s brought for her is nicer than Gabe’s in some ways.  He’s got a little tea and the brioche he bought.  He doesn't have a candle for her.  Ana wasn't one for the things and she wasn't Catholic like Jesse and Reyes.  What he does have for her is an old fashioned flare, the kind that never fails.  It lights up steady and neat.  It’s the kind of flame that burns long and bright and Jesse’s too lonely to need that nowadays.

            For flowers he’s got a handkerchief embroidered with himmelsherold.  It’s a creamy white affair edged in eyelet lace and looks too clean and fragile in his rough hands.  He thought that Ana deserved to have something from Angela, too.

            Her spread is no less sparse than the other grave with his canteen filled with tea and the bread laid out on the cloth.  The red glow of the flare behind it leaves shadows across his boots.  The difference is that it’s wrong in a way that makes his neck prickle.

            He leaves her six bullets.

 


	3. Chapter 3

            He comes with armfuls of marigolds, now.  They grow them at Gibraltar: his kind that bloom in little sprays and unfurl in a shock of red and gold and orange like the sun cresting the horizon, and Mei’s kind, the biggest damn yellow pompoms he’s ever seen.  Ana liked roses better than marigolds and he’s brought her a bouquet of those in yellow.

            He doesn’t know exactly why he’s here.

            Ana is waiting for him back at base.  Gabriel Reyes is an owl faced ghost.  Jack never died.

            Ana left. Jack didn't die. She didn't die. He left.

            They didn't die.  When Overwatch was scattered.  When they were getting picked apart and shot down like flies.  When Jesse had no place to call his home.  They didn't die; they left.  and they stayed gone.

 

            Gabriel died.

 

            Gabe died and was resurrected and the man walking in his place is so eerily like him.  And Jesse.  Jesse doesn’t know how to handle that.  Turns out that there aren’t a lot of resources for when someone comes back from the dead.

            Jesse’s older now.  He’s a little wiser now, hopefully, and he can admit to a body that his old Commander was the closest thing he had to a father.  A man like that doesn’t bring a boy in from the cold and leave no marks.

            Jesse knows he laughs like his father.  He knows he shoots like him, too.  He’s strong and resourceful and smart just like his Pa and he knows it.  Knows that he’s damaged in the same kind of way. Sometimes he's scared that he's a complicated man like his Pa; he's scared that he might be cruel to be kind or kind to be cruel.

            But the death faced ghost running around in his father’s place is and isn’t the same man.  So he figures, he’s got at least one grave to decorate this year.

 


End file.
